Five Cliches
by rattyjol
Summary: Given five prompts I wrote five oneshots, each focusing on one or two Animorphs. Spoilers for #54 in the second one.
1. Rachel: Hot and Cold

Marco thinks she's hot, but scary, and he'd never seriously consider asking her out on a date.

Jake used to think she's beautiful but she's his cousin and now he only sees the darkness that lies beneath, and he uses it and she lets him because they don't have a choice.

Cassie thinks she's pretty but she's glad she doesn't have looks like that. She'd rather be an unknown.

Ax doesn't understand human beauty (well, okay, when he's in his human morph maybe a little) and so all he can see is the icy warrior that lies beneath.

Tobias sees it all. He sees the pretty face and the attractive body and the berserker that quite frankly scares him peeless, even as a hawk. But most of all he sees _her_, and that's why she loves him.


	2. Aximili: A Shot in the Dark

**Warning: spoilers for #54.**

* * *

{Tobias.} I found him where I knew I would, perched in his old meadow. He made no response but I knew his hawk body well enough to be able to pick it out from a crowd of nearly identical hawks. That's a human expression, I believe, but I've never understood why one would need to be able to pick out one of something from amongst several identical or similar things.

{Tobias . . . Nephew.} Family ties were important to humans, Tobias especially. I hoped. I wasn't sure how well I really knew him anymore. {You cannot continue to cut yourself off. Your mother has been expressing a desire to see you again.} No response. I decided to try a different track.

{Please come to the funeral. She would have wanted—}

{You don't know what she would have fucking wanted!} he raged suddenly, and the volume of his thoughtspeak surprised me. I had been under the impression that grieving humans found comfort in doing what they believed the deceased would have wished them to do. Evidently I was wrong. {No one knows what she would have wanted,} he continued, his talons digging into the tree bark, {because she's fucking _dead_!}

He spread his wings and took flight. I watched him go and said to myself, {At least I tried.}


	3. Jake and Cassie: Thick as Thieves

"Jake," I said softly, my head lolling against his shoulder, and he gave a noncommittal grunt in response. "What are we doing here?"

"Enjoying ourselves," he answered, and he sounded half asleep as his fingers trailed across my shoulder and made me shiver.

"No, I mean . . . " I hesitated, trying to find the right word. "_This_." I pressed a palm to his bare chest. "Why?"

He sat up, frowned blearily at me. "You didn't want to . . . ?"

"No," I said, shaking my head. "No, of course I did. But—" I broke off and reached over to pluck a leaf from his hair. "Jesus, it's been what, two and a half years now? And how much do we really know about each other?"

Wide awake now, and reaching for his shirt. "I don't get what you mean."

"Okay." I shut my eyes. "Okay. What's my favorite color?"

"Green." But I could hear the uncertainty in his voice, the way it lilted up ever so slightly at the end like an unspoken question mark.

"Brown." I opened my eyes and stared at him, searching out every detail of the face I knew so well. "See?"

"Cassie," he said, pulling me suddenly into his arms. I felt myself pressed firmly against his torso. "Cass. This is who we are. We've saved each other's lives. I love you. The little stuff doesn't matter, right? It's the big things that are important."

"Right." I smiled, shut my eyes again. "You're right. Okay."


	4. Tobias: Old Habits Die Hard

"Tobias, dude. Chill." Marco's hand gripped my shoulder in the darkness and I realized I was practically perched on my chair with my arms held out slightly to the side as if preparing to take flight.

"Right, sorry." I slid into a more normal position, took a deep breath. The seat back was rigid and stiff against my spine and I didn't like it. "Habit." Someone shushed us from a few rows back as the opening credits started rolling.

"Cheesy music," Rachel muttered into my ear. "And cartoon characters running around smashing up the credits. This is going to be a _great_ movie." I gave a short, breathless chuckle and then felt for her hand in the darkness. I felt like I was going to throw up.

Marco had decided, in his annoying Marco way, that as long as we weren't going to go around getting ourselves killed this afternoon, we might as well go do something fun. Ax had wanted to learn more about human culture and so the others decided to take him to the movies. They'd managed to find one playing with an hour and a half runtime, so he didn't have to miss any of it, and Rachel had decided, in her slightly less annoying (but somewhat more aggressive) Rachel way, that I was coming along too. We'd planned things out carefully, finding a place behind the theater where Ax and I could demorph and get wings after the movie (or in case of emergency, but we were hoping it wouldn't come down to that, which meant it probably would) but it was going to be close and I wasn't happy about it.

"Tobias," Rachel hissed, pushing me down into my seat. "_Sit_."

"Sorry."


	5. Marco: Dog Day Afternoon

It was one of those hot, sticky afternoons when you don't want to do anything but sit around in an air-conditioned room and do absolutely nothing, except maybe play video games. Of course, California didn't get nearly as hot as, say, Florida, but it was pretty damn close.

Unfortunately, neither air-conditioning nor video games were a viable option at the moment. His father had gone into a fit of drunken rage last night – not at anything Marco had done, he thought, but he could never be sure – and thrown a bottle at the thermostat, effectively killing the air-conditioning and shorting out the power for the whole apartment building in one fell swoop. The maintenance staff still hadn't fixed it yet and Marco was sure it would take at least a week because that was how things worked in their building.

So he was stuck with frozen TV dinners that were no longer quite frozen (but the freezer was insulated so at least they stayed somewhat cool and he wished he could climb inside instead) that he dug out after lunch and left on the counter in the hopes they'd be thawed out enough to be edible by evening.

His father was still passed out on the sofa.


End file.
